Assessment of Student Learning and Its Role in Music Teacher Evaluation


Cynthia Crump Taggart


The assessment of student learning is a central part of the instructional process in many, if not most, outstanding music classrooms. In fact, the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), in its Position Statement concern- ing Assessment in Music Education, “recog- nizes that assessment, and the accountability that stems from the public dissemination of the results of assessment, are key components in building quality instructional programs” (Na- tional Association for Music Education, 2014, para. 1) and recommends that all music pro- grams adopt some form of assessment that measures “student learning across a range of standards representative of quality, bal- anced music curriculum, including not only responding to music but also creating and performing music” (National Association for Music Education, 2014, para. 7). Through as- sessment, teachers can learn more about what their students know and can do so that they can individualize instruction to meet their students’ educational needs. By engaging in the iterative, interactive, and on-going cycle of planning- teaching/learning-assessing, teachers can create meaningful and appropriate music learning en- vironments for and with their students.


The Changing Landscape


Assessment, when implemented in a contextual, developmentally appropriate, student-centered way, improves teaching and learning. Yet, in re- cent years, this primary purpose of assessment often has been co-opted by the need to provide evidence of student learning for the evaluation of schools, school districts, state educational systems, and, more recently, individual teach- ers.


The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) mandated assessment and accountability for public schools at all levels and arguably was the driving force behind the shift from student- centered assessment to high-stakes testing (Na- tional Research Council, 2001). Because of NCLB, schools, school districts, and states are


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required to provide evidence of student learn- ing, “to better empower parents,


educators,


administrators, and schools to effectively ad- dress the needs of their children and students” (NCLB Sec 6132(1)). Unfortunately, the result of NCLB in many settings is that the assessment of student learning has transformed into “high stakes” testing and has become an obstacle to be overcome rather than an integral and meaning- ful part of the educational process. And, more recently as a result of legislation concerning teacher effectiveness, the “high-stakes” nature of this testing has begun to put individual teach- ers at risk because of how it is figuring into the teacher evaluation process.


In their 2012 an-


nual report, the National Council on Teacher Quality reported that 30 states require at least some objective measure of student achievement as part of the teacher evaluation process, and 11 states use the scores from these measures as the primary determining factor.


The implementation of these federal legislative measures mostly has been left to the discretion of individual state legislation. Michigan’s law (PA 102) requires that data on student growth will be used as one of the categories in evaluat- ing a teacher’s job performance (State of Michi- gan Legislature, 2011). (For more information about this law, see the article by Moore and Catherman in this issue.) In 2013-14, this data will determine 25% of teacher pay, increasing to 40% in 2014-15, 50% in 2015-16.


Although the Michigan Council for Teacher Effectiveness (MCEE) expressed concerns re- garding value-added measurement (VAM) con- ceptually, this group recommended that, for mu- sic and other non-tested subjects, each school district should be able determine how it will as- sess student growth and learning in music, and districts can choose to use scores in the tested subjects to determine up to 10% of student learning and growth in music (MCEE, 2013). They noted that the Michigan Department of Education is in the process of developing as- sessments to measure student growth and learn-


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